Back in January, Nvidia revealed that it had a two Parker SoCs on a board that it calls Drive PX 2 and that the Volvo XC90 will be the first car to use it. A few days back, Uber revealed that customers in down town Pittsburg will be able to use Volvo XC90 cars for their Uber rides.

The important thing to mention is that Nvidia technology is inside as the Volvo XC90 is using DRIVE PX 2 as the heart of the self-driving vehicle. Tesla which was seen as a leader in the self-driving arena was using Mobileye and it plans to end this relationship as soon as it can, due to a death. Most cars today including expensive BMWs which have the highway autopilot feature use Mobileye.

Nvidia Drive PX 2 is much more powerful as it has two Parker CPUs and two 256-core Pascal based Cuda cores and it can deliver 24 trillion deep learning operations per second to run the most complex inference algorithms. If that is not re-assuring enough, the Drive PX 2 system has three teraflops of performance for deep learning. In case you don’t speak geek language, Fudzilla spent a lot of time investigating technologies crucial to self-driving including object detection, Lidar, RADAR, ultra-sonic sensors and all in all, self-driving cars are on their way to be safer than humans.

Uber is a smart business and it wants to get rid of the most expensive part of its transportation business model, a human driver. This won’t happen overnight as the Pittsburg trials will require all Volvo cars to have a person in the driver seat that will sit there “just in case”. The car will drive itself, but the person in the driver's seat will be able to take control at any given moment.

Nvidia and Volvo expect that self-driving cars should hit the streets by 2020 while Mobileye was targeting 2021. Both of these dates are closer than most of you think, and it will make everything safer. Most daily commuters spend an awful lot of time on their phones, not paying attention, and the self-driving car will watch the street all the time, refreshing information in milliseconds and being able to react much faster than any human.

Volvo said that combined with Uber, both companies spent some $300 million on a Volvo based self-driving Uber car. Volvo will make the car and Uber will buy it.

Håkan Samuelsson, president and chief executive of Volvo Cars, said:

“Volvo is a world leader in the development of active safety and autonomous drive technology and possesses an unrivaled safety credibility. We are very proud to be the partner of choice for Uber, one of the world’s leading technology companies. This alliance places Volvo at the heart of the current technological revolution in the automotive industry.”

It looks like that Uber, Volvo and Nvidia will profit, as essentially this is Nvidia’s biggest win to data, and the self-driving powered by the Nvidia Drive PX 2 will happen much sooner than anyone expected. The first ride will mark the day when Nvidia finally stops being a GPU-graphics cards company. The change of Tegra strategy we mentioned back in 2014 is finally paying off.

Danny Shapiro, Nvidia's Senior Director of Automotives, has revealed a few details about the "Parker", Nvidia’s Newest SOC for Autonomous Vehicles.

Nvidia also detailed its new Parker chip at the Hot Chips conference too, but essentially all you need to know is that Parker is a 16nm FinFET ARM V8 CPU with two Denver 2 + 4x A57 Coherent HMP and with a 256 Cuda core Pascal Geforce GPU.

Just a quick view of the CPU's configuration gives you a clear signal that this SoC is unlikely to end up in any tablet. Two Denver 2 + 4x Cortex A57 seems like something that need to be plugged in to a power source all the time such as an autonomous car, a next generation shield console or the rumored Nintendo NX console.

The Nvidia Pascal 256-Core GPU supports DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.5, Nvidia Cuda 8.0, Open GL ES 3.1, ARP and Vulkan. This is the same number of cores as Nvidia had with the Erista, Tegra X1 but of course Pascal cores are much more efficient than the Maxwell and they should be able to clock them higher. It was rather clear with Tegra X1 that this SoC will not make it to any tablet shaped device due to its high power consumption and the Google Pixel C design win was the best that Nvidia could achieve.

The GPU can decode and encode H.265, VP9 both up to 4K at 60FPS. It also supports a 12 Megapixel camera sensor.

Two Parker SoCs power the Drive PX platform as Nvidia wants to power deep learning applications, even in a motor car.

More than 80 carmakers, tier one suppliers and university research centers around the world are now using our DRIVE PX 2 system to develop autonomous vehicles. This doesn’t mean that Nvidia will have as many design wins, but it looks like a big opportunity.

The Volvo XC90 is the first vehicle supporting DRIVE PX 2 and since Parker delivers up to 1.5 teraflops of performance for deep learning-based self-driving AI cockpit systems, Volvo could end up with a rather safe self-driving car. Since DRIVE PX 2 has two Parker SoCs, you end up with 3 teraflops of performance for the deep learning, self-driving AI cockpit system.

The combination of two Parker SoCs with a total of four CPU cores each and 2x256 Cuda cores, means that the Drive PX 2 might deliver 24 trillion deep learning operations per second to run the most complex deep learning based inference algorithms.

Parker supports dual-CAN (controller area network) interface, a standard connector in the car industry and Gigabit Ethernet to transport audio and video streams.

The Hot Chips conference that takes place in the last weeks of August will be a fun place to be. Among many others topics, Nvidia plans to talk about its Tegra-Next System-on-Chip.

We assume that this is the Parker chip for the cards allegedly come with two Denver 64-bit custom cores from Nvidia and four ARM Cortex A57s. This makes an odd mix, but Andi Skende, a chap with more than eight years at ATI as graphic architect, Fellow at Advanced Micro Devices for almost 14 years and since then Principal System Architect and Distinguished Engineer, Tegra System Architecture will give the audience a few more details.

It is expected that Parker will get an updated GPU to Pascal and all this will be manufactured by TSMC using a 16nm FinFET. With some luck, there should will be products coming based on Parker at the end of 2016 but it is more likely we will see it next year.

Now Nvidia is kind of at a crossroads as the company is making money from cars, and it doesn’t really makes a difference in the mobile market. The Nvidia Parker could be a power greedier chip that might not fit into tablets, but at the same time it will give incredible computing performance to people who are developing autonomous driving cars.

Parker definitely seems delayed since it has been more than a year since the Erista or Tegra X1 came to market. Let me remind you about the conversation that we had with the head of Tegra in early 2014 - quite a while ago.

Nvidia also plans to talk about the Ultra-Performance Pascal GPU and NVLink Interconnect at the same conference while MediaTek thinks it will be a good idea to talk about Helio X20: The First Tri-Cluster Deca-Core Mobile Application Processor SoC with CorePilot 3 Technology for High-Performance and Power-Efficiency.

Samsung plans to talk a bit more about its Exynos-M1 CPU while ARM wants to unveil Bifrost, the new GPU architecture and its initial implementation, Mali-G71.

AMD will be one of the last companies to talk and it plans to talk about a new high performance x86 core design.

Nvidia appears to be the latest chip designer to use Samsung’s and GlobalFoundries’ 14nm node. The company won’t be alone, as the same node will be used by Apple, Qualcomm, AMD and of course Samsung.

According to Business Korea, the new node will go online in the second quarter of 2015. Apple, Qualcomm and Nvidia will be among the first outfits to use it, aside from Samsung. Samsung could lead the way with the first 14nm ARM SoC in the upcoming Galaxy S6, but this is still speculation and nothing is confirmed.

A Samsung official told the publication that 20nm is already a “mainstream technology” and that rivals are trying to compete with 16nm FinFET, but Samsung is in an advantage.

“Our company has already introduced the production process of 14 nm FinFETs,” the unnamed Samsung source told Business Korea.

Qualcomm is using TSMC’s planar 20nm node for its latest Snapdragon 810 flagship SoC and the chip seems to be experiencing some thermal issues, although Qualcomm is playing them down.

As for Nvidia, its first FinFET product should be Parker, a SoC based on the company’s custom 64-bit Denver core and Maxwell GPU.

For much of the year we were under the impression that the second generation Maxwell will end up as a 20nm chip.

First-generation Maxwell ended up being branded as Geforce GTX 750 and GTX 750 TI and the second generation Maxwell launched a few days ago as the GTX 980 and Geforce GTX 970, with both cards based on the 28nm GM204 GPU.

This is actually quite good news as it turns out that Nvidia managed to optimize power and performance of the chip and make it one of the most efficient chips manufactured in 28nm.

Nvidia 20nm chips coming in 2015

Still, people keep asking about the transition to 20nm and it turns out that the first 20nm chip from Nvidia in 20nm will be a mobile SoC.

Our sources didn’t mention the exact codename, but it turns out that Nvidia wants to launch a mobile chip first and then it plans to expand into 20nm with graphics.

Unfortunately we don’t have any specifics to report.

AMD 20nm SoC in 2015

AMD is doing the same thing as its first 20nm chip, codenamed Nolan, is an entry level APU targeting tablet and detachable markets.

There is a strong possibility that Apple and Qualcomm simply bought a lot of 20nm capacity for their mobile modem chips and what was left was simply too expensive to make economic sense for big GPUs. 20nm will drive the voltage down while it will allow higher clocks, more transistors per square millimeter and it will overall enable better chips.

Just remember Nvidia world's first quad-core Tegra 3 in 40nm was rather hot and making a quad core in 28nm enabled higher performance and significantly better battery life. The same was true of other mobile chips of the era.

We expect similar leap from going down to 20nm in 2015 and Erista might be the first chip to make it to 20nm. A Maxwell derived architecture 20nm will deliver even more efficiency. Needless to say AMD plans to launch 20nm GPUs next year as well.

It looks like Nvidia’s 16nm FinFET Parker processor, based on the Denver CPU architecture and Maxwell graphics won’t appear before 2016.

Nvidia's Tegra roadmap did changed a bit since last January, especially since Nvidia demonstrated its 64-bit ARMv8 architecture called Denver. Nvidia chose not to show Denver at the show and one of the reasons we've heard is that this was not a consumer oriented show. It was a CUDA, science community and professional market oriented event, hence no room for Tegra.

Head of Nvidia’s Tegra division Deepu Talla did confirm previous reports that Denver based Tegra with Kepler graphics should ship in the second half of 2014. He didn’t discuss any performance or features other than what was said before. We got some additional information. Parker is not gone from the roadmap, but it is coming at later date, after Erista. Erista, the son of Logan (Tegra K1 was codenamed Logan ed. ) sounds like a smaller update or a derivative of Logan with a Maxwell GPU, but this is not something Nvidia was eager to discuss.

Parker is coming after Erista. Last time Nvidia showed a slide that had Parker, it revealed that this chip could have a Denver CPU, Maxwell GPU and FinFET transistors. We know that many companies have had a problems when they wanted to move to a different kind of transistors and we know that Intel needed quite some time to move to its 3D transistors.

We cannot get into any details on the roadmap change and we do not know if something went wrong with Parker in mobile and Volta on GPU/Computer side, as we could not get any definitive information. Nvidia simply said the roadmap where Erista comes after Tegra K1 is the one that we should use from now on.

Stacked RAM is the next big thing. It will enable much faster communication between the chip and the memory and with the current 384-bit design such we saw on Kepler, the stacked RAM version can end up with 800GB/s to 1000GB/s bandwidth.

This is some significantly faster than the 288 GB/s that we saw with GK110-based products such as the Geforce GTX 780 Ti or Geforce Titan. The K20X, the fastest professional solution available today, is stuck at 250GB/s with the hope that its Maxwell successor will get slightly higher bandwidth.

The new point to point communication chip called NVLink will also help solve the memory bandwidth issue. Most algorithms in the word that are used for computation or hard tasks in graphics such as ray tracing will always end up asking for faster memory access. This is why Pascal will play a major role in the future of compute units such as Nvidia's Tesla products, or faster 4K or gaming of the future.

We saw some presentations at the GTC with a projection of Volta (now Pascal) where a scientist expects that with 1024GB per second bandwidth, Pascal could be aiming at 4000GFLOPS a second in dual precision and 12000GFLOPS a second in single precision computation.

To put things in perspective the GK 110-based Tesla K20x with 14 SMXs and 250GB/s bandwidth offers 1310GFLOPS of dual precision and 3950GFLOPS in single precision. Tesla K20x is an actual product, shipping as we speak, while the Volta (Pascal stacked RAM GPU that hits the market in 2016 ed.) numbers are projections. These final numbers will depend on the final clock and configuration of the high-end Pascal chip.

Based on these projections you can get close to three times faster computation power, and this is a huge leap that will happen some two years from now.

The future looks interesting and don’t worry, if you want to do realistic rendering and ray traced lightning effects or global illumination, you will need at least a few of these 12000GFLOPS per second cards to enjoy a real time experience. Real time ray tracing in computer games will still be a dream even beyond significant computational and memory improvements in 2016. However, this does not mean that we will not see some hybrid ray tracing solutions over the next few years.

Nvidia decided to shed more light on upcoming Logan and Parker SoCs at the GPU Technology Conference on Tuesday. The move is bound to raise some eyebrows, as Nvidia is getting into a rather bad habit of talking up Tegra chips months before they actually show up.

Still, there is some interesting stuff to report. Logan, or Tegra 5, will feature CUDA 5 and a Kepler class GPU. Nvidia hopes the combination will help it drastically improve GPU performance, by a factor of three over rival GPUs. Logan will also support Open GL 4.3.

Moving along to Parker, which might be the Tegra 6. It is said to feature more advanced Denver CPU cores and it will be able to use 64-bit ARMv8 cores, so it will be Nvidia’s first 64-bit SoC. It will also feature Maxwell GPU cores, which should deliver twice as efficient as Kepler cores.

It all sounds nice but we won’t see the chips anytime soon. The first Tegra 4 products should show up in a couple of months, followed by Tegra 4i phones in late Q4, or possibly even early 2014. Tegra 5 should launch in about a year, in early 2014. Parker, or Tegra 6, will show up in 2015.

So why on earth is Nvidia spilling the beans on its upcoming SoCs? Some investors might like it, but that doesn’t explain it. Nvidia always had a public Tegra roadmap, but it did not go into detail. Perhaps it is just leaking like a sieve and instead of plugging the leaks it just decided to confirm them.